November 24, 2020, Toronto — The Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) is proud to announce a multi-year donation of photographs by celebrated Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose iconic images have brought worldwide attention to the impacts of human industry on the natural landscape. The first installment of this gift comprises 142 photographs from the artist’s early career, a selection of which have been made public in a virtual gallery on the RIC’s website. Subsequent annual gifts will make the Toronto-based photography centre the most important global repository for the study of Burtynsky’s oeuvre.
Edward Burtynsky began his career in the late 1970s at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University). "It was important to me that my life’s work be housed in a Canadian institution, and it felt like a fitting 'homecoming' to entrust these works to the same place where I first developed as a photographer,” Burtynsky says. “The Ryerson Image Centre has become one of the leading museums in the world for photo historical research and has a growing collection of artist archives. I realized that there was no place I would rather have my work preserved and studied.”
Read the full press release here.
Read MoreFuture Cities Canada
A Conversation with Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and Globe & Mail visual art critic Kate Taylor kicks off the first week of Future Cities Canada: #UnexpectedSolutions, a six-week virtual city-building gathering showcasing the best-of in innovation in cities from across Canada and around the world. The free public talk takes place on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 10 a.m. and is the first of three new thought-provoking conversations presented as part of the TD Future Cities Speaker Series, a program supported by TD Bank Group through its corporate citizenship platform, The Ready Commitment. Launched in 2018, this series presents ideas from some of the world’s leading minds in urban systems; this year’s topics explore themes ranging from climate adaptability and placemaking to housing and infrastructure.
Read the full press release here.
Register for free here.
Read MoreRight now the message of Earth Day, on its 50th anniversary, seems more urgent than ever. There’s no doubt that the ravenous human appetite to conquer nature has compelled us to encroach on natural habitats and biodiversity in an ever-expanding way, and that this has led us to where we are today — isolated at home with a new pathogen determined to wreak global havoc. It seems the paradigm has shifted: where humans once had our collective boot on nature’s neck, we now find ourselves with nature’s boot firmly pressed against ours.
Gerhard Richter once said that “art is the highest form of hope” and my hope is that during this time in isolation I am able to create a suite of images, going back to my roots and looking at nature, with proceeds going directly to support the art sector in Canada.
The arts have taken an oversized hit during these times and will continue to suffer enormously because of this crisis. And yet, it is the artists, musicians, filmmakers and performers to whom we are all turning for catharsis, relaxation, distraction, entertainment and, perhaps most importantly, hope. Artists now need our support as much as we need theirs.
I do not know what the next few months will bring, but in this time of isolation and contemplation, I can be assured of one very important thing: the future of life on this planet rests in our hands. There may one day soon be a vaccine for this virus, but there is no vaccine for climate change.
Until such a time as life can return to something we are a little more familiar with, please stay safe and be well.
– Ed
Read MoreBy Edward Burtynsky
The Globe & Mail
It feels a little surreal to be commemorating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in the middle of this unprecedented global crisis. Admittedly, I had envisioned this day much differently, yet with COVID-19 forcing us all into isolation, the message of Earth Day seems more urgent than ever.
My 40-year career as an artist has taken me on a journey around our planet in search of the largest examples of human systems expressed upon the land and sea. I have been to many places that very few of us have any reason to go – the places where we wrest out the things we need from nature to propel our human destiny. My first trip to China in 2002 took me to Wuhan en route to photograph along the Yangtze River, where entire cities and landscapes were being commandeered and flattened to make way for the building of the Three Gorges Dam. So, when the pictures first emerged of the coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan months ago, never did I imagine seeing cities being shut down in this new and devastating way – or that we would soon experience this contagion all over the world.
There’s no doubt that the ravenous human appetite to conquer nature has compelled us to encroach on natural habitats and biodiversity in an ever-expanding way, and that this has led us to where we are today – isolated at home, with a new pathogen determined to wreak global havoc. It seems the paradigm has shifted: Where humans once had our collective boot on nature’s neck, we now find ourselves with nature’s boot firmly pressed against ours.
Read the full article here.
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